Tot School – Sept. 13, 2009

Matthew is 36 months

It was another fun week in Tot School land. :)  I know it looks like we do a lot, but I want to stress that we normally spend about one hour “doing school” on Tuesday mornings, with only a couple more planned activities thrown in here and there if M asks for them on other days, which he normally does lately.  We try to spend time every day on an art project too, but other than that M’s time is spent mostly in self-directed play; normally I try to let the art project be very self-directed too.  Sometimes his free play time is with me or Daddy (and if it’s a definite learning-type activity I try to capture it with some pictures) and very often on his own, or with a friend.  Regardless of what it looks like we really don’t spend all our time on school! :)
Ok, now that that is out of the way… here’s what we did this week. :)
I showed M the new letter H file I put together for his ABC book.  I posted about this here and made it available for download. :)
First, He put helicopter and “H” foam stickers on the Hh templates:
He pretty much insisted on putting the stickers around the letters instead of on them. :)  Simple as this was, M absolutely loved doing it.
Then he practiced tracing the letters.  He wants to draw his letters so badly, so I included this activity in the file (you can see his tripod grasp is pretty non-existent, or was on this day anyway):
We played a tic tac toe game using Hard Hats and Hammers:

And we went through little pictures of things that begin with H.  I’ve found this is a one of the best activities to help him learn the sound a letter makes.  I always include this with our ABC book pages.  We say /h/ /h/ /h/ hammer, /h/ /h/ /h/ house, etc, stressing the initial sound as we look at each picture.  It’s fun and kind of turns into a chant of sorts.
We worked on the Heart pattern strips… he is just not getting the concept of repeating patterns.   Ah well, I need to remain patient and remember at 3 the important thing is lots of exposure to a concept and it will finally *click*. :)  Here’s the pattern strips after I re-did them the right way, ha:
Finally, he colored the shapes for the shape House.  He is so not into crayons.  If I had let him use markers I would’ve gotten a better response, I think.  He colored for a while, like this: then he wanted me to finish it.  I had him tell me which color to use for each part, then did it.  He enjoyed being the teacher. :)  Here is the shapes house all finished and put together:

After that we did a few more tot school activities – we used our counting mats to count with M&Ms. :)  We are still only going up to number 4 because he still is working on one to one correspondence and the idea that the last number you say is the number of items.

I created a little measuring activity for him.  I got the idea here, and altered it slightly.  M is really, really into tools lately and of course that includes what he calls his “measurers”, which is a tape measure and a square with a ruler on the side.  So I made this: (ignore the close up of my dirty carpet, please)

He loved this and I think it would’ve gone over even better if I had used something other than ribbon to measure.  But, that was all I could think of at the time.

Then we practiced scissor skills by cutting out large shapes drawn on construction paper:He did so well with this, we saved the shapes to show to Daddy later.  I wish I would’ve taken a picture of them all cut out.   
He loves this little paperclip color match game.  He just recently became very good at doing this and is enjoying his new found skill.  He wanted to do this again another day but lost interest pretty quickly.  So I grabbed the bag of paper clips and gave him a new challenge – paper clip chains: I’m noticing this kid does not smile much for pictures.  Please believe me, though, when I tell you he enjoyed an activity. :)

He practiced spooning the pretty, pretty glass pebbles from a glass dish into an ice cube tray:

We did our fantastic movement cards again and got a little exercise in.  I am thinking of making this a daily activity.

Another day he was itching to do some hammering, so I gave him a large piece of styrofoam that came in a package we received and a baggie full of golf tees.  This kept him busy on and off for most of the day.  The next day he took the golf tees (“nails”) out with his pliers – I was impressed he thought of this – I sure hadn’t. then as I was doing laundry he decided to saw it.  The boy is all about tools these days.  This is what awaited me after the laundry: It was a mess.  But I was not too bent out of shape about it – he had thoroughly enjoyed himself, and the amount of time it kept him occupied was definitely worth the 10 minutes or so of cleaning and vacuuming I had to do. 
I’ve been trying to have a small activity set up for him to do independently around 4:00 pm when Daddy is not yet home but dinner needs to be cooked.  This week we tried stenciling with our do-a-dot painters:I really need to pull together some more activities for this purpose – any ideas?  Nothing too complicated to set up and something he can do by himself.  You know how it is when that time of day rolls around…
Here’s my favorite picture of the week.  M’s cousin S came over and she is a crafty kind of girl.  They crafted all day.  She has been dying to make a sunshine guy like M made a long time ago.  They both made new ones and then posed with them for me: Aren’t they sweet? And the kids are nice too.  ;)  Hee hee.
For more great tot school ideas, go here!  Sorry for so much rambling this week! :)
Have a beautiful day! :)

ABC Book – Letter H

It has taken me more time than I planned to get back to our ABC Book, but I have finally finished the pages for H. I haven’t shown it to M yet, I’m planning on doing it with him during our normal Tot School time this week. So you are getting a sneak peek!
The inside:
M has really been asking for help drawing letters lately, so I’m going to start including some sort of tracing activity for each letter from now on. For H – our letter template, with dashed lines, and laminated so he can use his window markers to trace the letters, then wipe them off and trace them again!
Next, a Tic Tac Toe game using Hammers and Hard Hats:
Two songs about the letter H (sorry only one song is pictured, but both are included in the printable file):

An envelope full of things that begin with H:
Heart pattern strips to match:
And, on the back, a shapes House to color, glue, and build:
I decided to use velcro dots instead of glue for the shapes house, so M can put it together as many times as he wants. I also use velcro dots to keep all the envelopes in the file closed.
Click here for the printable file of all the activities – Letter H.

You can print as many pages as you want and of course use them however you want. You do not have to make an ABC book. :) If you just want the tic tac toe game and the shapes house (or whatever), print only those pages. You could make them into activity bags.
If you use any of them, let me know – I’d love to see what you’ve done!


The instructions for putting the activities together are written on pages of the file, as well as information about where the graphics were found, which sites I used for the letter templates or songs, etc.

Have a beautiful day! :)

Our Flannel Board – part 1

 

M just LOVES our flannel board.  I’m sure you already know this, because I’ve said it on this blog about 20 times already. ;) 

The flannel board has become such a big part of our day lately - “school” time and just playtime too – that I want to share a few things about it – including how I made our board, the different ways I make the felt sets, which felt sets we have, and how we use them.

Since we have about 20 different felt sets, with lots of ideas for more, this is going to have to be a series of posts.  I hope it gives you some great ideas!

To make our flannel board, I used a large piece of foam core board from Michael’s (2’ x 3’, I think).  Some people choose to use a heavier material such as plywood, but I wanted ours to be lightweight and easy to transport since we move it around the house, or sometimes put it away.  M was very small when I first made our flannel board and I didn’t want him to get hit in the head with something heavy, should he pull it over on him (our board is not attached to the wall in any way, it just leans up against it).

I bought 1/2 yard of blue flannel and attached it to the foam core board.  To cover the board, simply pretend you are wrapping a present, then secure the fabric to the back of the board with glue or duct tape.  I used white duct tape and it has held up fine for over 2 years now.  It is not very *pretty* on the back, but we never see that side and easy means more to me than pretty does for something like this!

I also found an 8” x 10” piece of corrugated cardboard, and used some leftover flannel to make a smaller version that we take with us on car trips:

The first felt set I made for M was a group of simple shapes in different sizes.  He was less than 1 year old and had fun simply manipulating them, sticking them in his mouth (bleck!), and trying to make them stick to the flannel board.  We had them out all the time and made fun geometric designs with them: I repeated the names of the shapes for him, and sometimes the colors, over and over while he picked them up and did whatever he wanted with them.  He knew the names of all the shapes pictured within a few weeks.  Sometimes we used them to talk about soft versus hard.

The next set pictured is what I refer to as our “miscellaneous set” – it’s a little bit of everything.  I found many of the templates in Flannel Board Stories for Infants and Toddlers, by Ann Carlson, which I picked up at our local library.  Some of the printed pictures were found on various pages of the DLTK-kids.com site.

These were just for fun since M was still so little, and are things that M found interesting – a car, an airplane, a school bus, a semi-trailer, a little boy with clothes you can change, and a couple of puppies.

This is a good point to discuss the various ways of making felt sets.  Most of these were simply made by drawing or tracing with felt tip pens right onto the felt pieces, then cutting them out. You can use all colors of felt-tip markers, but make sure they are permanent markers, so the colors don’t bleed if they should happen to get wet.

To make the puppies and similar picture-pieces, I printed the pictures onto regular paper and cut them out.  I then put a thin layer of white glue on the entire back of the picture and placed them on a piece of felt.  A heavy book on top made sure they stayed flat as the glue dried; once it was completely dry, I cut it out along the edge of the picture.  This is one of my favorite methods – it’s just so easy to do, and the felt pieces hold up very well.

If you find pictures online that you would like to use, another great way to make them is to print them out, laminate them, and hot glue a piece of sandpaper to the back.  Sometimes the rough part of velcro works too, but I have had better luck with sandpaper; and the rougher the better.  This is easy to do and the pieces stay in great shape, but they are not quite as much fun for little fingers to play with as felt is.

{I sometimes copy a black and white picture into my computer’s “paint” program to color it before printing it out to use this way.  Of course, you could also color them with markers or crayons before laminating them.}

Fabric stabilizer sheets also work for use on the flannel board.  These color well with colored pencils or crayons – simply draw, color, and cut out the piece you want.  The stabilizer is rough enough to stick on the flannel board by itself.

In the next flannel board post I’ll share some of our other sets, and how I keep them organized, as well as the different things we do with them!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – Sept. 6, 2009

M is 36 months old.

Tot School is just becoming more and more fun (for both of us) as we go along. This week M kept saying “That was fun!”, “I’m having fun!”, and various similar exclamations at random times. I hope he meant it and wasn’t just trying to talk himself into it!

In winter we were in the routine of doing something with the sensory tub almost every day. I’d let him pick lentils, rice, noodles, or whatever each day and he’d basically play with his little cars or little people in it while I had a little Mama-quiet-time in the mornings. You know, time to pray, read, actually put two thoughts together in a row, or simply sit and stare at the wall. :)

For some reason I never tried hiding things in the tub for him. This post from Jolanthe made me change my mind. So I grabbed his letters from his See and Spell and hid them in some rice. There wasn’t enough rice, so I mixed the lentils and pasta in too. Who says the sensory tub should only have one sensory experience in it at a time?

This is how he started – looking for the letters:
But it quickly turned into this:
I guess old habits die hard. We did get a lot of rice and lentils and noodles on the floor, but it was vacuuming day anyway, so I wasn’t too worried. Plus, it’s always fun to give him the dustbuster and make him vacuum with it. The dustbuster could keep this kid occupied all day if the battery didn’t run out. :)
I made up some new activity bags over the weekend; I was really excited about them. First, sandpaper and yarn (I’ve seen this on a lot of blogs, but first read about it in The Toddler’s Busy Book, by Trish Kufner).
It was not a big hit at all; apparently it was very boring:
So, we did a little scissor practice. I’m still trying to figure out where I first found these pages to print. I need to print out some that are a little more difficult, because M did these perfectly this time! He just loves cutting!
Then we did this little book from the Mailbox (June issue, I believe). It is a book about a seed that gets planted, then sprouts, grows a stem, gets leaves, and finally flowers into a sunflower. On each page M had to pick the correct picture to glue on, depending on the stage of the plant. He did fine with this, but wasn’t really “into” it, and didn’t want to color it.
Next we played checkers. Rather, we tried to play checkers. I know, I know, this is way too advanced for him and I was way too impatient to keep explaining it to him. BUT he has been asking for a checkers game since he saw a picture of one in a magazine.
This is how far we got before we both gave up:
Another activity bag I made up for him was these foam shapes. I cut slits in them and you can fit them together to create… well a bunch of shapes that fit together. :)
He loved this activity, although it didn’t really turn out like I hoped it would. I think the slits should’ve been shorter.
Another activity bag I made him was this “Silly Critter” game from the most recent issue of our High-Five magazine. I put magnets on the back and we used a pan to match up heads, bodies, and legs to make “silly critters”. We both liked this one!

We used our animal flashcards from Target for a matching game with M’s little zoo animals:

He did his name puzzles with milk jug lids (always a favorite!):
This is our newest addition to the flannel board – 10 in the Bed (found here):
He LOVED it and did it several times that evening with Daddy. Again, I have to get a post done about how great the flannel board is and all the things we do with it. Soon, I hope!
We read this GREAT book – Clap Your Hands, by Lorinda Cauley . It has activities on every page that the child (and the mama) can act out. It is a huge hit!
Then, in keeping with the actions theme, we did these movement cards* from Sparklebox. I put them in our pocket chart and M turned each one over, then we did whatever it said. They are fantastic – there are ones for balance that you do standing in one place; some you do while “traveling”, like skipping; and some you do on the floor, like rolling like a pencil or somersaulting. (There were others, but they were a little advanced; I only printed the ones I knew would be fun for M.) I was hot by the time we finished and even a little bit sweaty I am embarrassed to say, hee hee. These will definitely give you your exercise for the day!
Here’s M at the end of his somersault (I did NOT do a somersault), I love the goofy expression on his face!
For more great Tot School ideas, go here.
Have a beautiful day! :)
*I got the idea to do movement cards like this in the pocket chart from somebody’s blog and I wish I could remember who!! If it was you, please let me know and I’ll add your link. I decided to use the movement cards from Sparklebox, but there were some others available too, and they were linked on the other blog, so I’d like to share them!!